Improve Performances of 36 m Small-Angle Neutron Scattering (SANS) Spectrometer

Improve Performances of 36 m Small-Angle Neutron Scattering (SANS) Spectrometer

SMARTer, a 36 m SANS spectrometer owned by the National Nuclear Energy Agency of Indonesia (BATAN), was installed at the Neutron Scattering Laboratory (NSL) in Serpong, Indonesia. Over the past two years, various works have been carried out to optimize its performance. Some standard samples were measured for inter-laboratory comparisons.

Introduction
Small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) is widely used for static and dynamic structural analyses in materials science and biology fields. It has a spatial range of 1-100 nm and has revealed many important scientific findings over the past three decades. There are now more powerful SANS instruments being designed, constructed or commissioned at various research institutions around the world.

SMARTer
SMARTer is a 36 m SANS spectrometer owned by BATAN, Indonesia. It was installed in 1992 and was the largest SANS spectrometer in the Asia-Pacific region at that time. The spectrometer was not well utilized due to problems with its detector and computer system. In 2005, an in-house work plan was proposed to replace, change and upgrade the systems.

Control System
The most important work done was replacing the control system with new ones. The original control system used a dedicated IBM PC PS2/70 under AIX operating system via RS232C interface connection. New control and data acquisition systems were required immediately.

Instrument Performance
Some standard samples were examined using SMARTer, and the results are comparable to those of other laboratories. A nearly monodisperse dilute solution of 65 nm polystyrene latex sphere was characterized at several experiment settings.

s
The SANS BATAN spectrometer has been upgraded and its recent performance shows an improvement in its performance. The major improvements were the replacement of the main control system, re-alignment of the collimation system, new beam stop adjustment system, implementation of data reduction and analysis software, and wavelength and q calibrations.

Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge R. Knott of ANSTO, Australia, H. Hasegawa of Kyoto University, Japan, A. Wiedenmann of HMI-Berlin, Germany, and E.G.R. Putra for their support and collaborations.

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